CNN executives have rigged the July 30 Democratic debate to protect “their party” from a damaging repeat of the first debates, GOP Sen. Tom Cotton said Tuesday.

“CNN has said they are not going to have hand-raising or yes/no questions,” he told an event organized by the Center for Immigration Studies. “Well, that’s because CNN … understands that the party they represent was embarrassed by the hand-raising questions [in the first debate and] … CNN does not want to do anything to hurt their party,” said the Arkansas Senator. 

Cotton’s jibe was prompted by dramatic moments in the first and second TV debates for the Democrat candidates when nearly all were recorded raising their hands or voices to endorse the decriminalization of illegal migration and the award of free healthcare to illegal migrants.

Cotton’s answer came during a conversation about immigration policy and its damaging impact on ordinary Americans’ ability to earn a decent living.

“The Democrats have lost their mind when it comes to immigration,” Cotton told host Mark Krikorian. He continued:

As the Democrats have become a party focused less on kitchen-table isues, [and] on what matters to working Arkansans, when they are worried about not having enough paycheck to make it to the end of the month, or worried about providing for their kids’ braces or their education. They just have focused a lot more on questions about race, gender, sex, identity. For them, it has become [more] of a question about identity than a question about economics and security …

You know, if you’re rich, if you’re a rich lobbyist and you live in Bethesda, or if you are a rich ex-president and you live in Chappaqua outside New York, you know, mass migration is a pretty good bargain for you.

Immigrants are not coming here to take your job as a lobbyist, or take your job giving $200,000 speeches, so you don’t have to worry about the impact it has on your local economy. You’re not sitting in an emergency room waiting to get healthcare, not being able to see a doctor, and in the meantime, it drives down the price of al the personal services that you depend on in fields where you have a lot of immigrants working, like childcare, and housecleaning, landscaping, manicures, and pedicures, [or] new fusion restaurants as well. So the story in Bethesda and Chappaqua and Los Angeles and Silicon Valley of mass migration, is a pretty unalloyed good. But if you’re in rural Arkansas or along the border in Texas or in manufacturing communities in the upper Midwest, it is the opposite story. But the Democratic Party largely represents those elites on the coast now. They don’t represent a lot of hard-working communities across the country.

Immigration Numbers

Each year, roughly four million young Americans join the workforce after graduating from high school or university. This total includes roughly 800,000 Americans who graduate with skilled degrees in business or healthcare, engineering or science, software or statistics.

But the federal government then imports about 1.1 million legal immigrants and refreshes a resident population of roughly 1.5 million white-collar visa workers — including approximately 1 million H-1B workers and spouses —plus roughly 500,000 blue-collar visa workers.

The government also prints out more than one million work permits for foreigners, tolerates about eight million illegal workers, and does not punish companies for employing the hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants who sneak across the border or overstay their legal visas each year.

This policy of inflating the labor supply boosts economic growth for investors because it transfers wages to investors and ensures that employers do not have to compete for American workers by offering higher wages and better working conditions.

This policy of flooding the market with cheap, foreign, white-collar graduates and blue-collar labor also shifts enormous wealth from young employees towards older investors, even as it also widens wealth gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, and hurts children’s schools and college educations.

The cheap-labor economic strategy also pushes Americans away from high-tech careers and sidelines millions of marginalized Americans, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions. The labor policy also moves business investment and wealth from the heartland to the coastal cities, explodes rents and housing costs, shrivels real estate values in the Midwest, and rewards investors for creating low-tech, labor-intensive workplaces.

“If there is a growing flood of foreign labor, the American middle class is no longer going to exist, and Republicans will not have a constituency,” said Hilarie Gamm, a co-cofounder of the American Workers Coalition.